


there will always be better days

by evil bunny wolf (evil_bunny_king)



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Frank POV, it's kastle people, lingering gazes, lingering hands, we live off this stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2018-06-08 17:56:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 7,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6867442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil%20bunny%20wolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's really not for me to say, Frank," Karen Page says, from the edge of his hospital bed. She's got hair the colour of gingersnaps, and stardust crammed under her fingernails. When she speaks it's like she thinks she's losing a war. "But I think your family must have loved you very much."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. try again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oneshot/drabble collection.

"It's really not for me to say, Frank," Karen Page says, from the edge of his hospital bed. She's got hair the colour of gingersnaps, and stardust crammed under her fingernails. When she speaks it's like she thinks she's losing a war. "But I think your family must have loved you very much."  
  
The words hit him like a sledgehammer.  Worse, maybe, for at least that he can see coming and he feels his throat close around the pain, ball it up nice and tight.  
  
"OK," he says, feeling the click when he swallows. "OK."  
  
Small fingerprints smudged across the piano lid. Small fingers smearing paint across grinning faces. Dresses. Hands.  
  
A shuffle from her side. She's moving, he's not really paying attention, but then she's walking towards him and pressing something into his hand and so he turns and looks and he sees-  
  
And then there's a heat, an intensity, pressing at the front of his skull. Something thick and feeling, that storms around in there until his thinking's slow, dumb, useless.  
  
He nods, and feels his neck creak as he does it. Nods again, nonsensically, and the photo crinkles in his big hand, waxed paper and dotted ink.  
  
Time passes,  and he's not sure how long it is before he finds he is able to breathe, again.  
  
"Thank you," he mutters, when he's able.  
  
"For what?" He thinks he hears her say, but her voice is far away, now, and the lump in his throat is engorged, his eyes burning. He reminds himself to blink.  
  
"For- for helping me remember."  
  
-  
  
He sees a kaleidoscope of their faces, one after another. The million ways he's known them flashing by all at once - like one of those infinity mirrors, the ones they set up at carnivals.  
  
alive.  
  
dead.  
  
alive - wide grins, dopey ass expressions, hanging like monkeys out of his old man's prized apple trees;  
  
dead - with their jaws blown half-off and dangling as he cradles their little heads, pushes the meat back in, hopes they're not still breathing.  
  
He sees it like he could fucking reach out and touch them again. Like he could try and piece them together again.


	2. There have been stranger things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neither of them can remember anymore how many times she has patched him back together.

Karen is running her fingers through his hair.

It’s a careful touch. Clinical. Her hands trace the shape of his skull, smoothing through the blood - she’s trying to figure out where it’s coming from, whether it’s his, and it’s not, and he should tell her that, but his throat, it’s all stuck together like treacle. His eyes feel like they’ve been weighted by dumbbells. He feels more than he recognises himself flinch. He feels more than he sees as she moves away.

She rustles through something by his head, her haphazard med-kit, he thinks, and starts to speak. He’s not really sure why.

“Maria’d get these, ah, tensions headaches. You know?”

Karen doesn’t respond. The rustling subsides, something clicking behind him and then a cool, damp cloth swabs gently at the back of his neck, working up his skull.

“Yeah?”

Her voice is all quiet, like she’s tamping it down. She nudges him gently, inclining his head forward, and he lets her, this cold little shiver running through him at that touch. She throws aside the cloth she’s holding – it’s gauze, he sees when he can wrestle his eyes open – and then she goes in with a fresh piece, scrubbing at his hair. He must really be a mess up there. He doesn’t really give two shits.

The places where her fingertips press into his skull, he notices that.

“They’d, ah, get her real good, yeah?” he continues. “Dig right on in there, clean wiping her out for hours at a time. Nothing we could do about it. We did all that CAT scan shit, visited the Doctor’s, the hospital, even a few of those alternate therapy places, but all of that, it did fuck all.”

A hum behind him.

“Did she always have them?” she asks.

He tilts his head, stopping when she holds him still. Tries to think.

“Yeah.” His throat clicks around the word and he swallows with a little difficulty before she offers him a bottle of water, helps him drink it. “Thanks. Yeah.”

The bottle disappears, and her hands return to his scalp, gently smoothing their way up.

Another piece of gauze tries and fails to make it to the trashcan before her hands fall to his shoulders in a brief fit of frustration, fists light through his flak jacket. She stays that way a moment, breathing through her nose. Breathing as if something’s hurting her.

He listens as she unfolds herself from the cot behind him and then steps away, sneakers scuffing on the hard floors. She faffs around with something that rattles like the snakes in his old man’s westerns; her meds, he thinks, something to knock her out good and thorough until the migraines pass.

But no, no, this, this isn’t Maria. She’s Karen, Karen Page and they’re holed up in one of his weapon caches in a warehouse somewhere, dredged from the fifth circle of shit.

He shivers again, feeling that coldness crawl down his spine.

“- Frank.”

The bottle’s back. And when he cracks his eyes open again, she’s holding up a painkiller of some kind, expression tight as she looks him in the eye. But she’s still looking. He’s still not sure why.

He ignores the pill, taking a difficult drag from the bottle instead.

“Thanks,” he says again, and she sighs, but still, she clambers back behind him.

They fall back into that odd kind of silence.


	3. a name

It’s dark in the office of Nelson and Murdock. The streetlight outside hasn’t worked in a week and through the open blinds cycles of headlights flash grotesques across the walls, carving shadows across the trays of the defunct office machines. She’s dragged her desk lamp down to light a circle of her floor, illuminating the files strewn across the floor. She sits there, staring at the bloody picture they make, feeling her heart thud against her ribs.

For each body, there’s a choice. She’s has the rap sheets, convicted and non-convicted, she can see the correlations between execution and crime - there’s thought, precision beneath the violence, and the rage, this is a  _punishment_ and her ears ring with remembered shot gun blasts, fingers itching with the memory of a trigger.

Crime, execution; punishment. People on meat hooks, shot to pieces; people beaten until they look like meat, parts broken or missing entirely.

Frank Castle, the medical file says, between descriptions of the skull fragments removed from the entry wound and exact caliber of the bullet.

“Frank,” she tries, even as her gut clenches as she says it, out of some primeval fear or superstition, as if he could look back at her through the photographs.

But he can’t.

So she keeps on digging.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s a dream. Karen knows that it’s a dream.

There’s a shadow at her door. Hands up, silhouetted against the hall’s flickering lights but in her apartment it’s dark, it’s dark, and Frank approaches with his hands held flat, rolling each step from heel to toe.

“Shhhh,” he murmurs. She raises the gun in her hands. It’s Wesley’s, it’s her .380, it’s a small, silver flimsy thing with fake crystal embossed into the handle and pressing into the flesh of her palm and she stares him down over the barrel, pointing it at the centre of his chest. She holds it with the steadiness of someone who has killed before. The look in his eye tells her he knows it. “Sssh,” he says, “easy."

“Hands on your head, Frank,” she tells him.

He does so. He’s in the hood and jacket from the woods, she sees, an arc of blood sprayed across the grey fabric, his neck. Nausea swells up from her stomach. She knows it Schoonover's. He'll never get the stain out.

Frank still moves towards her. His gaze is fixed on hers, his hands on his head.

“And now stop, Frank,” she croaks uselessly, through the lump in her throat. “Stop, or I swear to god…”

“You’ll shoot me,” he finishes for her, still so softly, so gently, but he doesn’t stop.

He steps into the muzzle of the gun and presses until she feels him there.

He looks at her the way he did between the trees in the headlights of Ben’s car.

_why did you do it?_

“You waiting for something?” he asks. She pulls back the hammer until it clicks, resting her finger against the trigger. He deserves this, she _needs this_  - but he, he doesn’t even flinch. She feels the gun rise and fall with his every breath. “Think somethings going to change? Think the risk’s worth it?”

The machine gun outside rattles as it loads. She recognises this part, they both do.

Moving before she can even think to, he takes the gun from her hands again and drags her to the floor beneath him.

“You don’t get to hesitate, Page,” he breathes against her cheek as he turns her head away from the bullets. She feels the apartment tremble around her, the plaster bursting above their heads as he holds her there. His fingers are wrapped around in her hair so tightly her scalp almost burns.

When it ends he twists her head back towards him and presses the gun into her hand. “And you don’t get to do it twice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah this one doesn't make overly much sense but still I like it


	5. lazy, rainy afternoons

The rain hisses against the windows when they finally stumble, soaking wet, into his box apartment.

“You first,” he grunts to Karen, gesturing towards the small bathroom. She nods, pausing by the doorway to scrape off her trainers, bracing her hand against the wall and leaving wet smudges against the plaster. This place is temporary, like all the others, the peeling paint of the walls already dampening in the downpour- but still she stops to take off her shoes.

He feels a smile tug at his mouth in a way he’s not so familiar with anymore before he walks into the kitchen, his combat boots trekking mud over the cheap linoleum.

“Coffee?” he rasps out, as he reaches the sink.

He hears the shuffle of her socked feet pause as they make their way down the hall. She’s looking at him when he glances over, as if she’s weighing his mood, eyes all too bright in a pale face. The rain’s gotten through her woollen coat, too. Dip-dyed her hair brown.

“Yes. Please,” she adds, as an after-thought, and he nods, turning back to his single stove, reaching for the kettle.

The shuffle of feet resumes, disappearing behind the bathroom door. After a moment, the shower buzzes to life too.

-

By the time she re-emerges he’s changed and sat at the shoddy little table in the middle of the kitchen, bent over the sodden pieces of his colt. He’s placed her mug of coffee on the counter, black and sweet how she likes it. His own’s on the corner of the table.

She settles herself in the seat opposite him, hands curled around the mug, and waits for him to look up.

“So,” she says, after another moment, to break the silence. He sees her fingers flutter from the corner of his eye. “Are we going to talk about why you showed up tonight?”

He finishes and places the barrel in the centre of the table before he glances up at her, double taking when he sees exactly what she’s wearing. She’s raided his room, stealing one of his long sleeved shirts. It’s huge on her. She’s using the sleeves to insulate the mug.

She meets his twitch of a grin (another unfamiliar motion) without batting an eye.

“Feeling comfortable?” he rasps and she shrugs a little, taking a sip of coffee.

“Better than I was.”

She’s piled her hair on top of her head beneath a towel, a few fly-aways escaping to graze her neck, drip water onto his shirt. He pulls his gaze away.

“There’s a drying rack in the corner, if you want,” he says to the gun. “Hang your clothes up.”

He watches from the corner of his eye as she processes that, a peculiar expression crossing her features. Must be a bizarre thought: the big bad Punisher, doing laundry.

She doesn't otherwise move. He accepts that and returns to the gun.

“I take that as a no, then," she says, after a long moment.

He looks up on a frown and she sips her coffee, gestures with it. “You’re not going to tell me why you showed up, out of the blue, on a run of the mill info drop?”

He feels the threat of another smile. Tamps that back down. She doesn’t sit for his bullshit. He's pretty certain she already knows the answer, though.

“Why’d you come?” is all he says. She raises an eyebrow and laughs.

“Because when the Punisher shows up I know to listen.” She stirs her coffee, blinking at him thoughtfully, following the line of thought. “I had unintended company?” she guesses. He tips his head to her.

“Right in one.”

She nods. Nods again, as if she’s comprehending that, boxing it away. “And we waded through the streets of New York because…?”

He shrugs again, going for the coffee. “No one else would be crazy enough to do it.”

That startles another laugh out of her. “Right. Of course.” She goes for a sip of coffee. Wraps the fingers of her free hand around her cuff as she worries at the edge with her thumb, the only tick she lets slip of how's she wrestling the fact she has a bounty on her head.

That awareness sits there between them a moment. It's hollowed by the rain, the dirty orange glow of New York smearing through the haze.

“Next course of action, then?”

He flexes his fingers around his mug. “No use pursuing it tonight.” Autumn storms flushed the rats from the sewers, but sent the rest of the scum scrambling for cover. They'd prep in the meanwhile. But this, it wasn't going to be finished easily, or soon. He considers how to phrase that.

He tilts his head, flicking his gaze back towards her. "You shouldn’t go home yet. Tomorrow, maybe the day after, I'll play clean up.”

“Right.” Her grip tightens at the way he says _clean up_ , despite her nonchalance, but still she nods, sends him a mirror of a smile. “Sounds like a plan.”

"Yeah."

She’s got more questions; she always has more questions. He waits for the barrage - the list any normal person would have and then a multitude more, the journalist’s quirk, her own unique flavour of curiosity.

For once, though, she doesn’t ask.

He glances up at her and she’s tucked her legs closer to the seat, looking out towards the window at the rain.

He considers her as he sets aside his coffee and then puts the colt back together, sliding it back, empty, into its holster.

He could say something. He could try and ease this for her, somehow; tell her things he knows to be true: that she’s doing a good job (as useless as he feels it is sometimes), that she’s safe (for now), that he’s not going to let anyone hurt her.

Those kinds of pleasantries, though, it’s all meaningless from the mouth of a dead man.

So he runs a hand through his almost-dry hair. Lets the silence sit.

“Hungry?” he finds himself rasping, after a while.

He’s not quite looking at her, he’s looking out the window. Rain on the glass. Lightning in the distance.

She gives him that look again. The one where she’s not sure what he’s thinking – the one that’s quick, and probing, as if she’d give anything to scratch beneath the surface, to see what’s going on in that scarred up brain of his.

He continues watching the rain and it passes.

“What do you have?” she asks, after another moment.

He shrugs, glancing at her.

“Eggs.”

She laughs. Works her hands further into his shirt, hunched uncomfortably as she is in his spindly little chair.

She could look small, sitting like that, dwarfed by his clothing and the sparseness of the bare room.

She doesn’t.

“Okay,” she says with a little nod.

He rocks himself to his feet and goes to make omelettes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah I'm moving things around - this isn't new, I'm just consolidating my AO3. And putting a few more pieces of substance in this, haha.


	6. Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

Rocking up on the Punisher’s porch at 3am with a bottle of whiskey is not something Karen had ever pictured herself doing.

There’s the booze, for one. It’s the bottle she’s had tucked in her cabinet for months: still wrapped in christmas paper in all of its frilly glory and to be honest she’s not even sure what type it is, let alone what it’ll taste like, but it was alcohol and when she’d lurched out of her apartment an hour ago that had seemed like it was good enough.

The ‘Punisher’ part, obviously, is another. It takes a special kind of damaged to even think of making a casual house call to one of NY’s most infamous vigilantes (and yet another to be doing it in the middle of the night) but, well, Karen’d already accepted that she’d lost her semblance of ‘healthy’ somewhere between Vermont and this squashed little basement flat in the middle of Queens, and by now, she thinks, she’s can handle what comes with that.

The door to Frank’s apartment is green and peeling. Flecks of paint flutter to the ground as she knocks on it, the wood rattling like it’ll crack, but she makes herself stand firm, grip tightening around the bottleneck. She’s just that desperate.

A moment passes.

“Frank?” she calls, a little tentatively.

She’d been hoping he was here. He should be here- after the mayhem of his last few evenings she’d been certain he’d sit this one out, lay low awhile as the bones of the city resettled around its missing and gone. Even calamities have endings.

The door has a window, too. It’s small, frosted with age and crossed with bars, but she lifts onto her toes, peering through it all the same.

“Frank?” she tries again.

There’s another pause, heavy in the heat of the evening, before with a dull click the deadbolt is pulled back.

Frank Castle opens the door and takes in the sight of her on his doorstep.

“Ms Page,” he greets her – no, he drawls, and he crosses his arms across his chest, leaning against the door-frame.

He’s dressed down, she notices. Simple sweats, a tank top. Bare feet. She was right - he is lying low.

She lifts the bottle, shaking it invitingly. “Care for company?”

His gaze flicks from the bottle to her perfectly innocent expression and back, before he hums thoughtfully. “Bribery, huh?”

She withdraws the bottle a little. She might as well be a pane of glass.  "I should be affronted by that."

"Could be,” he concedes, “but you aren’t.” And he graces her with one of his quick grins, the ones that twist up the right side of his mouth more than the other and she can’t help but laugh.

“Cute, Frank,” she tells him. “You’re too damn cute,  you know that?”

He huffs a laugh, glancing away from her and scanning down the street, in that habitual way of his: “May have heard that one before, yeah.”

“I don’t know, though,” she says, tilting her head, and a silly smile tugs at her lips at the sheer audacity of what she’s about to say. She says it anyway. It’s 3am and she has a deadline, after all. “Not sure it goes well with the Byronic hero thing you’ve got going.”

He laughs properly at that. It curls through him, easing away some of the rigidity and exhaustion and he smiles at his feet before he looks back up again, expression tuned to critical bemusement. It’s a crooked, brief thing, though, his natural smile. “Gonna keep flirting with me until I let you in, Page?”

She fixes him with her most winning smile. “If it works - yes.”

He snorts, glancing away again. For a second she thinks he may just close the door on her anyway, shut her down and leave her to her dead-end story and the too-warm night, but then he steps back, gesturing her magnanimously into his hallway.

“Might as well save your dignity, ‘spose,” he says, as she shuffles in.

She pokes him in the stomach with the bottle for his trouble.


	7. slacks

Karen needs to invest in a pair of comfy slacks.

Yes, she has a wardrobe filled to bursting with work dresses and skirts, her blouses still pressed in their dry-cleaning bags and heels lined up in marching order - but there comes a time when half of her pencil skirts have rips up the thigh; when her hosiery is in tatters and she’s made more trips to the cobbler than she can count and so eventually she sits in her apartment and surveys the wreckage of her wardrobe and concedes - to the inevitable. Self-denial is antithetical to journalism, after all. Sacrifices must be made. Even in something as banal as this.

And so she goes out shopping the very next day and picks up a pair of the most comfortable, most  _versatile_  slacks she can find - she can play it smart-casual, she thinks, as she considers three pairs in the store’s cramped dressing room - and digs her running shoes out of broom closet: her old ones, with the pink stripes along the sides. She hasn’t worn them in over a year - since before she woke up with blood slicked to her elbows, a knife in her hand and unsticking itself from her palm as she let it fall to the floor - but holding the shoes in her hands now, with the mess and nightmare of the last few months behind her, she wonders - she wonders why she ever stopped, in the first place.

She rocks up to the Bulletin’s offices the next day with her laptop tucked under her arm, her notes in her briefcase, and resettles herself in the archives, kicking her sneakered feet before her as she delves back into her work.

Mitchell stops by for an update, a run down, leaving her with a coffee and a smile and that’s all the acknowledgment she needs, really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little change of pace, eh? :'3


	8. Chapter 8

It starts the same; ends the same. The diner, the scratched up laminate; the two mugs, crooked in the centre of the table.

“I know you’re a good man, Frank,” she tells him as they sit, eye to eye. Passing headlights stripe across the bruises on his face. The Buick idles on the curb outside. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t keep trying to push me away.”

He snorts, pulling off his cap to toss it on the table before them. She feels as much as she sees his knees shift beneath the table, the gun he holds against his thigh. “That transparent, am I?”

“No, Frank.” She leans across the space between them, deliberately, resting her elbows beside her discarded coffee cup. “You’re not transparent at all.”

Frank looks at her from the side of his eye. In the kitchen the waitress and the chefs are hurrying to the back, hurrying for cover, a ghost of herself huddling beneath a counter top with a knife clasped to her chest.

His gaze flicks to her hands and back.

“Is that what you’re looking for?” he asks, thoughtfully, dark beneath the bruises.

The diner door clicks opens.

She's never seen the men’s faces. She’s only ever seen the grizzly aftermaths: the grotesques of bone and meat slopped across the linoleum and too unreal to be human anymore and she thinks, if she turns around, that that is all she’d see now, too.

And so she doesn’t. She watches Frank with her heart in her mouth and he tips his head back, his gun steady beneath the table.

“You should get going now, Page,” Frank says. It's slow and controlled. It's emotionless and familiar, and she watches him watch the men at her back, as lazy footsteps clip across the tile. “You don’t like what comes next.”

The room explodes around her in sprays of bullets and broken glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dredging up some of the drabbles from my tumblr that I never posted. This could use more context, I know, but short of writing a longer fic around it (which was actually an intention but it never got off the ground) here we go.


	9. need you like a hole in the head

It’s been a bad night.

They’re camped out in his safe house. It’s pissing it down outside, they’re chilled to the bone, wrapped up in what blankets he had in his supplies and Karen stares at him from across the room, hunched up on his travel cot. She's wearing one of his shirts and sweatpants, the legs and sleeves rolled at the cuffs, bunching at the waist. It washes her out more than the water already has.

“What-” She begins again after a moment, and then she goes for her mug of coffee, reaching for the munitions crate she’s using as a table. Her free hand covers her mouth, her gaze flicking to his. There’s this thin tension between them. As if they’re wound as tight as the air outside, lightning coiled beneath their skin. “What happened tonight, Frank?”

He doesn’t look up from where he’s sat at the shoddy ammo table, examining his drenched rifle, running a towel along its length. Examine. Repeat.

“A shit show, ma’am.”

She makes a sound in her throat. “Don’t call me ma’am.”

“Okay.” He tilts his head, accepting that.

She’s not done:

“You see-” and there’s this edge to her voice as she says it, “the thing I don’t understand, is how it all went wrong so wrong so fast?”

He detaches the magazine, feeling his pulse throb in his throat, heavy and that little bit too fast.

“It happens."

She chokes out a little laugh

“It happens, Frank?”

He leans on his elbows, looking up at her at last, and she turns towards the window, bringing up her coffee to take a sip. There’s a flush on her cheeks, her eyes almost red-rimmed, violet in the crap light.

“You shot him," she says slowly.

“Yeah. I did,” he says, just as levelly. “And I’d do it again.”

They’ve had this conversation before. They’re gonna keep on having this conversation, he thinks, until she finally finds it unforgivable enough to walk away.

“He- he wasn’t even doing anything, Frank!” She gestures towards the window, her voice gaining heat. “I’d just been talking to him and then you-”

“Not doing anything?” He taps the magazine against the table, starts thumbing out the bullets. His pulse is this low little drum in his ears. He’s, he’s still buzzed, still humming. Not in the right place for this, but she’s gonna _press_ until he says something, and so- “you know that he was packing like all the assholes in that joint that night; you know the shit that he’s done-”

“And you know that’s not what I mean, Frank.”

He tilts his head, still counting bullets. “No, you mean he wasn’t doing anything just then, right? Wasn’t doing it right in front of you, so he gets a free pass, huh?”

She fixes him with a hard look, jaw tight. Holds him there, a moment, before she looks away and he feels a prickle of something, something like guilt, as she lets the silence speak for her, slice through his bullshit. She’s right, he’s misconstruing what she’s saying and he knows it.

He doesn’t admit it.

Stubborn as a mule with a head just as thick, Maria’d used to say.

Karen wraps her arms around herself and doesn’t say anything more, and so he lets it sit there, a while.

She re-engages with a clink of her mug against the frame of the bed.

“Frank-” He doesn’t look up. She takes a breath, muscles on: “you shot him in the head. Right in front of me. I still have blood in my hair. In my clothes. You couldn’t have-” _waited_ is what would’ve come next but she knows that’s wrong so she cuts herself off, frowns, pressing a hand to her temple again as if she wants to reach inside there and tear something out.

“You shot him and you almost started a firefight,” she starts again, and she pulls her hand forcefully back into her lap. He can feel her gaze like a brand at the edge of his sight. “And I was right there, in the middle of it. That’s the bit I’m struggling to get my head around. Do you not- do I just not-”

He feels something at that – a tightening in his throat, in his chest, at what she’s about to ask, what she thinks and he’s speaking before he knows it. There’s memories scratching at the edges of his thoughts, tinny music and whirling lights and the kids’ laughter. “No. I - You were safe, Karen. You were safe. Okay?Made sure of that.”

She laughs again, a little hysterically. “Really, Frank? Because once again, I only have your word on that. I sure as hell didn’t feel safe. And this,” and she waves a hand around the small bunker of a room, their scattered, wet clothes, drying on the ammunition racks. “This, wasn’t our deal.”

She hangs that out there a moment, watching him for a reaction, her knees pulled up to her chest. She’s made contact - shit, her words hit home, sharp and painful in a way he didn’t think he could feel anymore, but still, he says nothing. He stares at the gun.

It’s like watching a car crash.

She takes a breath, she lets it out, and it’s shaking and he feels it like it shudders through him as well.

“I don’t know if I can do this again, Frank.”

She says it, finally.

She takes a deep breath, and then another. Her brow furrows, and he sees her thinks that through, consider what she’s just admitted.

He sits, the bullets strewn before him, feeling the heat of his coffee mug burn into his hand.

“It’s your decision,” he says, when the silence stretches. He feels her eyes on him, peering over her knees but he keeps his eyes centred, controls his breaths: in, out. “You know that."

He waits for it.

She fixes him with those so-startling blue eyes, all the brighter for the tears that have welled in them, and then lets out a little laugh.

“You know I can’t do that, Frank.”

 _Perhaps you should_ is what he wants to say. Because she should. She should, but he can’t get himself to say the words and so he sits there and says nothing at all and she tucks her head against her knees, tugging her fingers through her hair.

After another long minute she gets to her feet, traipsing towards the bathroom. One of her pant-legs have come unrolled: it scuffs along the floor, dragging through their muddy footprints but she ignores it, kicking it out of the way when it threatens to trip her.

She pauses in the doorway, as if in a trance, and twists until she can see him again.

“Can I use your shower?” she rasps out, holding onto the doorway. He nods before he can think about it, the words sticking in his throat and she nods back, automatically, before disappearing into the room.

He sits in the kitchen for a little while longer, seeing and doing nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *jazz hands*


	10. Applebee's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Road trip, post-DD S2. Same verse as Starbucks.

The food comes and Frank digs into his burger. She takes a bite of her own, thinking, still thinking, and she can hardly taste it.

Frank sets his eye on her, finishes his mouthful and sets the sandwich down.

“What’s eating you.”

“Nothing.”

He doesn’t look away. “Bullshit.”

The silence sits there a moment. She considers her sandwich: the mustard smeared from the ham to the plate.

“Why did you agree to come?” she asks, at last.

She’s afraid, she realises, that this will be all it takes to make him leave. That if she reminds him of how unnecessary this trip is, how superfluous, then he’ll rock to his feet and walk out the door, leaving whatever this is - a companionship, a friendship, something - behind.

“Because,” he says, eventually. He reaches for his coffee mug and toys with the handle. He doesn't move to lift it. "I owe you. For your help before. That’s part of it.”

“And the rest?”

He ducks towards his drink, seeming to give her a look that says, _do I need to say it_?

She holds his gaze with the look that says _you know why I'm asking,_  her tongue between her teeth and that feeling of strangeness that’s hounded her for days thick in her skull.

He gusts a sigh.

“Because you asked me to.”

She toys with her fork, watching him behind the fall of her hair.

“Could’ve said no."

He hums, as if conceding, and sets aside his coffee. “Could’ve," he agrees.

“So,” she says, expecting more.

“So.”

He goes for his burger. There are some kids hanging around the jukebox, queuing up every 20 minute song they can remember and she could fucking laugh as Rush’s ‘2112’ comes on, just audible over the turned down speakers. The clatter of cutlery cuts through the dinner chatter. People eating, talking too loud, a baby crying somewhere and Frank is sitting with her in a fucking applebees pulling the onion straws out of his burger.


	11. Starbucks

She pulls them into the motel lot and they beeline for Starbucks. If Frank notices, or minds, he doesn’t say anything. He trails inside after her, getting a filter coffee, black, and they take the only table available, scrunched in the corner away from the window.

“What would you have said if they’d asked for your name?” she asks, as they sit. She’s never seen Frank in a chain coffee shop, before. She’s fairly sure - make that certain - that he doesn’t give a damn where his coffee comes from, but still, seeing him here feels- incongruent.

He has his hands arched in front of him, elbows on the table, and he gives her a look. “Frank."

“Just like that?” A surprised laugh is caught in the words and she sits back in her seat, hands falling to her lap. “You’re not worried you’ll be recognised, or anything?”

“All the way out here?” He makes a sound in his throat and his eyes flick to the window, somehow managing to dismiss the whole town with a glance. “‘Sides. Makes it easier to keep track. No awkward moments when you give the wrong name.”

The practicality of that tickles her. “Okay," she says, around a smile. "What should I call you, then?”

He reaches into his coat pocket, and tosses something - his wallet - in front of her, his attention on the window and the coffee in his free hand. She picks it up immediately, too curious for her own good. The wallet is as utilitarian as he is: thin, black, unobtrusive. Velcro rips as she opens it. She smothers another inappropriate urge to giggle.

She flicks it open, looking for the ID in the inside flap and suddenly she’s choking on air.

“Francis _Smith_?”

“Does the job,” he says, as if it’s not some kind of ridiculous, and she can’t help it - she laughs.

“You couldn’t - you couldn’t have chosen something else?

“Why.”

He’s cultivated his deadpan to the point whether she’s not certain if he’s serious or messing with her (probably both), and so she just laughs again, pulling the driver’s licence out of the wallet. Frank’s face glowers back up at her, just recognisable under the beard. The card even looks real.

She twists it under the light, admiring. “How did you even-?”

“I have a uh, contact,” he says, his hands collecting around his take away cup. There might even be a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Handy with that sort of thing.”

She hums, packing the card away and sliding his wallet back across the table and he folds it back away, as if velcro never went out of style. She's never going to forget that. She's not sure she'd want to. “Sounds useful. They have a name?”

“Micro.”

That he’d actually answered jolts her. She’d meant it as a tease; Frank had always been firm about the limits of their cooperation, but if he notices his slip he gives no sign. He swipes at his nose in that habitual way of his, that masks how he cases the area and the amused glance he shoots her way. “And no, I’m not giving you two an introduction.”

She hums, as she’s expected to, and slides the card and wallet back, returning her hands to her side of the table.

She finishes their script. “Not _yet_.

He makes an amused sound this time, hummed deep in his throat. “Sure.”

 


	12. the woods pt.1

Lisa finds the scars on his knuckles and along the sides of his fingers. She holds his hand between hers, the careless way a kid does, and her little fingers are dwarfed by his own, somehow finding tenderness beneath the thick chains of callouses.

“What's this one for, Daddy?” she asks, again and again, pointing at one and then another.

They sit together in their living room, the same way they did the last time he was here, except she fits in his lap differently this time and Junior is listening-not-listening on the floor on his old playmat, waging war with his GI Joes. So Frank tells them the stories - not the truth, that he can't remember most of them, but shit out of their comic books like trying to lasso with barbed wire, and Lisa twists in his lap to look at him, her face all screwed up.

“Really, Daddy.”

“As real as I'm sitting here,” he answers, straight-faced, but then he catches a glimpse of Junior staring at him in awe on the floor and cracks and Lisa stabs her finger into his palm as he starts to laugh.

“Daddy,” she admonishes, but she's laughing too.

He shuffles her over as Junior begins to pout on the floor, expression clouding over with the beginnings of an upset. “Hey, hey, buddy,” he says, reaching out, "hey", and Junior gravitates closer as if being pulled. When he clambers onto the sofa as well the three of them are a mess of limbs. Frank draws the two small, warm bodies to his chest, pressing a kiss into his son’s soft hair.

He's not sure if he still knows how to do this. Junior's hand clamps conciliatory, possessively, to the shoulder of his shirt. He's not sure if he knows these two humans at all.

“Hey,” he murmurs; he tries. ““Hey bud, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I was only messing with you, yeah?”

“Shut up, Frankie,” Lisa says suddenly, sourly, turning her head and tucking it into Frank's neck.

“Hey,” he says, frowning, his hands coming up to rest on their backs, but she won't look up and he feels the mood of the afternoon change, as swiftly and suddenly as dust kicked up over the sun.

They sit there awhile. It's silent save for Frankie's sniffles and then they calm and all’s left is the steady breaths of children clinging to him like a lifeline, a quiet bubble in the afternoon.

“I don't want you to go again, Daddy,” Lisa says, eventually. She mumbles the words into the crook of his neck and doesn't look up and he feels Frankie nodding on his left side. There's a beat. “I don't want you to go.”

He works his suddenly tightening throat into a response.

“I don't want to go either, sweetie.”

It isn't exactly the truth. It's not a lie either, but the words seem to sink into stomach and settle there, like dumbbells. Like weighted chains.

The kids’ arms tighten around him, holding onto him as tightly as they could.

 

-

 

 _Do it for Frankie,_ Karen Page says in the aftermath of the car crash. _Do it for Maria, do it for Lisa - tell me what happened, Frank, tell me, we can figure it out-_

A laugh that's more spit than breath and Schoonover knocks his head back against the trunk of a tree until he can look up at him, eyes glittering in the headlights.

“Yeah, Frank,” he coughs out, “tell her the truth.”

“You- shut up,” she hisses, trying to catch his eye, to scramble him back. “Frank, Frank please, don't do this, you don't-”

He drags Schoonover to the shed and throws him through the door, kicking him for good measure, feeling the swell of it, the weight of his rage, heavy like poured lead and throbbing behind his eyes.

“If you do this, I'm done.” Karen staggers along behind him, arm crossed over chest and slip-sliding in the damp mulch. “You do this and you're the monster they say you are, you hear me Frank? You’re dead to me.”

He looks at her, and through her. There’s a vice tightening around his chest, like he’s being squeezed, like there are small hands digging their fingers into his ribs, anchoring him to the world.

“I'm already dead,” he says.

And he shuts the door.


	13. the woods, pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So, where do we go from here?”
> 
> -
> 
> Continuation from the woods, pt. 1. Post DDS2.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooooo, uploading the last little things I threw up in my pre-Punisher excitement. I'm thinking about starting a new collection for 'after', I'm not too sure yet - we started here AND NOW LOOK HOW FAR WE'VE COME. So excited. But yeah, we've definitely reached a cut off now and so new series, new collection. Consider this part of the transition.

“So where do we go from here?”

Karen’s words are almost lost in the hum of the motor. It spits, chokes, and holds, or well enough, for the distance they need it, and she keels against the passenger side window, face turned towards the glass.

The trees stripe by in the headlights, curve, and then a gap yawns open, and he takes the turn, taking them out of the woods. Away from the cabin.

She scoffs, twisting a little in her seat, as much as she can manage, before she pulls something sharp. Her ribs, maybe. “So that’s it. You’re gonna drop me off, and I’ll pretend you didn’t just murder someone and you can just pretend- you can just-”

She bites off the words and turns back to the window, peering through the cracked glass. She refuses to look at him. He doesn’t want her to. He wants to drop her off by the closest phone booth and just, be gone, away from here, away from this mess he’s started.

His left-hand shakes on the stick shift. He feels it; he feels like a live wire, he feels scooped out. The same damn words keep going on a loop in his head – _feels better, now, right frank? Feels better, it’s better, you’ll be better-_

Except there’s nothing there but silence. There’s just, the hum of the car and their joint breathing, too shallow, fast, stress and pain.

“What do you want me to say,” he says, and the words swim out of him. “You wanna talk about it? Talk, talk about what?”

She said _and you can pretend._ He can pretend, what? That his family’s not dead? That he hadn’t held those pieces, felt their weight and seen the measure of their parts, where blood met fat met bone. That he hadn’t pulped the skull of the man who did it across a concrete floor and didn’t find the ending he thought he would, found something else instead, found more besides.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he finishes, and feels the words in his throat, feels them in his mouth, slicked against bloodied teeth.

She doesn’t say anything after that. She gets out the car once they’re out of the suburbs, when there's traffic lights and chain stores on each block, and he sticks around long enough to see her make it inside a Chinese restaurant.

It didn’t occur to him to ask her what she intended to do. She could turn around and the call the cops, lead ‘em right home, but that part, that part that asks him what he’s doing, what he’s thinking, it’s savage and quiet, waiting.

He stays until she's in, idling at the corner. And then he turns the car right back around, and drives back to the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also sorry for the double notification if there was one - I've been shuffling chapters around like crazy, if you couldn't tell! This is an eclectic story. But there you go.
> 
> I got rid of the emoji story, I'm sorry, it was just waaaaaay too silly


End file.
